On craft

Writing people who aren’t you, without doing harm

Sooner or later, every writer wants to put someone on the page who is not themselves — a different body, a different history, a different way of moving through the world. This is not a problem to be solved or a permission to be granted. It is the ordinary work of fiction, and it has been since the form began. The only real question is whether you do it with attention or with appetite — whether you arrive as a guest who has done the reading, or as a tourist who came for the photographs. This essay is about the difference, and about the small, unglamorous habits that keep you on the right side of it.

Research is not the same as extraction

Start with the part that sounds obvious and isn’t. Everyone agrees you should research a life you haven’t lived. Fewer people notice that there are two completely different things travelling under that one word. One is research as study: you read widely, you sit with first-person accounts, you let the texture of a life rearrange what you assumed, and you come out changed. The other is research as extraction: you go looking for the three vivid details that will make your chapter feel authentic, you take them, and you leave the person they belonged to exactly where you found them.

Extraction is seductive because it’s efficient. It treats a community like a quarry — somewhere to drive in, load up the truck, and drive out. The trouble is that the load you carry away tends to be the most legible, most marketable surface of a life, stripped of the contradictions that made it real. You end up with a character who is a costume of details rather than a person who happens to wear them. Study is slower and less flattering to the ego, because it keeps showing you how much you don’t know. That discomfort is the point. If your reading never makes you delete a scene you were proud of, you probably weren’t reading; you were shopping.

The trope is the path of least resistance

Tropes exist because they’re easy to reach for. When you write a group you don’t belong to, the culture has already handed you a starter kit of ready-made shapes — the tragic figure who dies to teach the lead a lesson, the sassy best friend with no inner life, the predatory villain whose difference is the menace. You don’t choose these on purpose. They arrive pre-installed, and they’ll write themselves through you if you’re not paying attention, because they ask nothing of you.

It helps to know what the well-worn ruts actually are before you find your wheels in them. Media-monitoring work — the kind GLAAD has done for years on how queer and trans people get portrayed on screen — is useful here not as a rulebook but as a mirror: it shows you the patterns that recur until they harden into expectation. The fix is rarely to ban a story shape. It’s to ask the harder craft question underneath: does this character want anything that has nothing to do with the protagonist? Do they get to be wrong, funny, petty, ambitious, bored — the full mess of a person — or do they exist only to service someone else’s arc? A character with their own appetites is very hard to flatten into a trope. A character who is only a function is already one.

A character with their own appetites is hard to flatten into a trope. A character who is only a function is already one.

Centre, cameo, and the difference it makes

Where a character sits in the architecture of a book changes everything about your responsibility to them. A walk-on — the nurse, the neighbour, the voice on the phone — needs only to be human and unstereotyped; you don’t owe a full interior to someone who appears for half a page. But the further you move a life you haven’t lived toward the centre of the story, the more the stakes rise. To carry a narrative on a perspective that isn’t yours is to ask readers — including readers who do live that life — to trust your imagination with their reality. That trust is earned slowly and lost fast.

This isn’t a ban on writing protagonists across difference. Some of the most generous fiction ever made does exactly that. It’s a calibration. The closer to the heart of the book a character lives, the more time, reading, humility and checking the work deserves — and the more honest you have to be with yourself about whether you’re writing toward a person or toward an idea of one. A cameo can survive a thin sketch. A protagonist cannot.

What a sensitivity read actually is

The phrase “sensitivity read” gets sneered at by people who imagine it as a censor with a red pen. It isn’t. An authenticity read — many editors prefer that name — is simply a specialist read by someone who shares the experience you’re writing about, looking for the places where your imagination quietly defaulted to cliché, error, or harm you couldn’t see from the inside. It’s closer to a fact-checker for lived experience than to a moral examiner. You wouldn’t write a courtroom thriller without letting a lawyer near it; this is the same instinct, pointed at a life instead of a profession.

Two honest caveats. First, it is paid expert labour, and should be commissioned and credited as such — not extracted for free from whichever friend happens to belong to the right group. Second, no single reader speaks for a whole community, and a clean read is not a certificate of innocence. The reader can only tell you what they saw; the choices, and the responsibility for them, stay yours. Used well, the process doesn’t make your work timid. It usually makes it sharper, because nothing improves prose like discovering the precise spot where it was lying.

Knowing when to step back

Here is the part writers least want to hear: sometimes the most skilful thing you can do is not write the story at all. Not because you lack the talent, but because the story is load-bearing for a community that has rarely been allowed to tell it first — and your version, however careful, will take up the oxygen and the contract and the shelf space that should have been theirs. Stepping back is not censorship. It’s a use of power. You always retain the choice to write the thing; choosing not to, in favour of clearing room, is itself a creative act, and frequently the more courageous one.

Passing the mic is more concrete than a noble feeling. It looks like recommending a writer from the community when an editor comes to you for the wrong reasons. It looks like blurbing, mentoring, citing, and pointing your readers toward voices with first claim on the material. It looks like asking, before you start, a plain question: is the best version of this book one I write, or one I help make space for? Both can be honourable answers. Only one of them is honest if you never asked.

A short, workable practice

None of this requires a theology. It reduces to a handful of habits you can actually keep. Read deeply and first-hand, until the reading changes a decision. Notice when you reach for a shape the culture handed you, and interrogate it. Give every borrowed life its own wants. Scale your care to the character’s place in the book. Commission and credit expert reads, and pay for them. And keep asking whose story this most truly is — staying open to the answer being “not mine to lead.”

Difference is not a hazard to be managed; it’s most of what makes fiction worth writing. The goal was never to write only yourself, on loop, forever. It’s to write outward with enough attention that the people you imagine would recognise themselves — and not flinch. If you want the longer argument about why any of this matters beyond the page, our work on representation and our trans coverage are built on the same premise this essay is: that getting people right on the page is continuous with treating them as people off it. The rest of the case lives in the wider culture we cover.

SectionWho gets to be on the pageWhy portrayal is a craft problem and a justice problem at once — and how to tell when it’s working.Read →SectionTrans lives, on their own termsWriting and reporting that treats trans people as people — never as a device, debate, or twist.Read →SectionThe wider culture beatBooks, screen and the long argument about who tells which story, and why it matters who holds the pen.Read →